Story of the song: Lyrics, literature trace emigration of Jamaicans

Emigration is a huge part of the Jamaican story. Even before the first wave of post-World War II emigrants to Britain sailed from Jamaica in May 1948 on the Empire Windrush, which stopped in Trinidad before going on to England, Jamaicans were involved in building the Panama Canal, which was finished in 1914.

Writing in The Gleaner in June 2000, Professor Patrick Bryan said: "Between about 1850 and 1930, Panama, Cuba and Costa Rica were the three most important destinations for Jamaicans. But there were other destinations as well - Ecuador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In the 1920s and 1930s, others worked in the oil refineries of Curaçao and Aruba. One folksong reminds us that 'Solomon grandpa gone a Ecuador, lef' im wife an' pickney outa door.' Another tells us of the Panama man who returns with a substantial gold watch, which, unhappily, he cannot read."

That second song ridicules the 'Colón man' who has returned to Jamaica with the evidence of his prosperity ("One, two, three four, Colón man a come"), but although he has a watch on a chain, when "you ask him fe de time an' him look up pon de sun".

From that time, then, Jamaican lyricists were engaging with the migration phenomenon, both those who had gone and left their offspring behind, at a time when the term 'barrel children' had not yet been coined, as well as the person who had come back - again at a time when a now common term, 'returning resident', was not a commonplace part of the language.

Distinctive culture

Bryan goes on to note that persons from the West Indies, including Jamaica, have carried their distinctive culture with them. He writes: "The sugar plantations of Cuba, the banana plantations of Central America, the railway systems of Panama, Central America, and even of Brazil and Mexico, by recruiting labour from the British West Indies, have ensured that in some of these areas there remain nuclei of the descendants of Jamaicans and other West Indians, who yet retain some of the patterns of culture that they took with them early in the twentieth century."

Which is what the Windrush generation also did, as Louise Bennett-Coverley captures in the wry, humorous Colonization in Reverse. It starts with the news of the mass movement:

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan' in reverse

By de hundred, by de tousan

From country and from town

By de shipload, by de planeload

Jamaica is Englan boun

However, it soon looks at the possible ill effects on English workers:

Oonoo see how life is funny?

Oonoo see da turnabout?

Jamaica live fe box bread

Out a English people mout'"

And Miss Lou closes with the fallout on England as a whole:

Wat a devilment a Englan!

Dem face war an brave de worse,

But me wonderin how dem gwine stan

Colonizin in reverse.

As purported lands of paradise and opportunity almost invariably turn out to be in reality, life in England was far from the proverbial bed of roses. In May 1948, a government statement printed in The Gleaner warned that "the prospects of employment in England for unskilled labourers are very slight".

Although there was the prospect of financial hardship, it paled in comparison to the physical danger associated with building the Panama Canal. Writing in The Gleaner in June 1998, Dr (now Professor) Ian Boxill reported on the research of a Gerardo Maloney of the University of Panama, who pointed out that "although West Indians migrated to Panama to work as free people, the conditions of their work were not consistent with the terms of the contract, which they signed. Indeed, over 44,000 black workers ('diggers') perished during the building of the Panama Canal. Of all the workers, they were given the most dangerous jobs. Also, the level of compensation for these workers was significantly lower than that which was paid to white workers, even when the white workers did much less demanding work. Furthermore, these migrants and even their children, who were born in Panama and are now citizens of the country, have endured, and continue to endure, systematic discrimination and exclusion from the economic benefits which they helped to create in that country. Consequently, some of the most depressed areas of Panama are inhabited by the descendants of West Indian immigrant workers."

There is one wave of emigration which has not made its way into literature and music to the extent of the Latin American and Windrush generation exoduses of largely unskilled labourers. As political turmoil hit a peak in the 1970s, many middle- and upper-class Jamaicans pulled up stakes amid fears of not only violence but also that Michael Manley was taking the country along a Communist path.

In his 1978 book, Jamaica Farewell, former Gleaner columnist, the late Morris Cargill, writes about his life in Jamaica - the final chapter about his own emigration. He writes about returning from visiting his mother for what he knows will be the last time he will see her and, crying, seeing a bumper sticker on the car in front of him: "Will the last person to leave Jamaica please turn out the lights."